As one of Congress’ first attempts to adapt copyright law to the digital
age, the DMCA stands as a law fundamental to the future of American copyright.
As such, it is vitally importance to know if the DMCA has positively contributed
to a legal structure that serves to secure the continued creation of art and culture
– or if it has been a misstep in enforcing copyright over the new digital medium.
This paper aims to contribute both theoretical and quantitative analysis to the
ongoing debate over the DMCA and the future of copyright in an increasingly
digitized world.
First, this thesis uses an analysis of legal and economic copyright theory to
highlight how DMCA serves to implement a strict enforcement of copyright law
that emphasizes the rights of content producers over content consumers. Next,
we conduct a quantitative analysis of the DMCA that demonstrates an association
between strict copyright-enforcing laws like the DMCA and a lower-thanexpected
output of art, information, and content.
Our analysis demonstrates that the DMCA has either failed to increase
appropriability in the information industry at a greater rate than cost to the
industry, or that the law suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the
composition of the content industry, leading the law to benefit a select few firms
while the industry as a whole suffers. Under either explanation of the data, the
DMCA is associated with an underperformance of the information industry as a
whole, and is strongly associated with an underperformance of the publishing,
software, recording, and film industries in particular.